I made these for birthday break at school, and lots of people liked them, so I am posting the recipe here.

Blackberry Bars

Good warm or at room temp.  We took them camping and they held together pretty well.

Cook Time: 50 min

Prep Time: 10-15 min

Dough:

• 1 cup all purpose flour
• 1 cup quick cooking rolled oats
• 2/3 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 cup butter melted

Filling:

• 2 cups fresh or frozen blackberries (frozen mixed berries work)
• 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
• 2 tablespoons water (cut in half if using frozen berries)
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

In mixing bowl stir together flour, oats, brown sugar, cinnamon and soda.

Stir in melted butter until thoroughly combined.

Set aside 1 cup of this oat mixture for topping.

Press remaining oat mixture into an un-greased 8×8 square baking pan. (round cake pan works too)

Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.

While it bakes, prepare the Filling: In a medium saucepan combine berries, sugar, water, juice and cinnamon.

Bring to a boil then reduce heat and simmer uncovered for 8 minutes.

Stir frequently then remove from heat.

Carefully spread filling on top of baked crust.

Sprinkle with reserved oat mixture.

Lightly press oat mixture into filling.

Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.

Cool in pan on a wire rack then cut into bars.

Modified from a recipe on http://www.grouprecipes.com/

One of the things that I think about often is how to teach the big picture, the huge scope of US history and the bits that fit together over time.  I know to people who teach the ancient world, or all of Chinese history, Russian history, or any of a number of other fields, think that US history is not long enough to worry about the long term!  But in fact, when I think about what I really want my students to come out of the class with, a good working mental map of the big picture is key.  I don’t want them to mentally stumble when they come across a reference to the Civil War and have to stop to work out if that was before or after the settling of the west.  And I know we can do a better job teaching the chronology without making it turn into memorizing a timeline.  This is my biggest goal for my class this year.  I need to get working on the specifics.

This is not, strictly speaking, a teaching or technology post.  But I have just finished reading Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, which has me thinking about education and craft work, and all the hands on learning that happens at Peninsula School.  

When I was at Peninsula I spent a lot of time in all the activities, especially clay, woodshop, and most of all weaving.  Billie Shaw was the weaving teacher, and she probably taught me more than any other teacher over the years, without me ever realizing it.  

After I graduated from Peninsula, my father bought one of the looms Billie had made redundant in the weaving room because someone had donated a better one.  The loom was supposed to be for me, my sister, and our friends Holly and Sidney. And all of us used it at one time or another, and we all warped it.  But I kept up with it longer, and when I had the chance in graduate school (space in a garage and as a bit of a reward for myself when I passed my qualifying exams), I moved the loom, Minerva, to Davis.  But when I moved to Chicago it went back into my parent’s basement, and one of the things I have been thinking about doing it setting it up again.  Yesterday I went over to my parent’s house and picked up all the dusty parts, and today I set out to put it together.  Here is the log I kept as I went:

Today is the day I am trying to put together my loom, Minerva, and go back to weaving.

It is 9:30am, and all the parts are on the floor.  At least I hope this is all the parts.

This is what I brought over yesterday.

Here are the bolts.

9:50, it is feeling like there are some bits missing.  And I have some really basic questions, like which way does the warp come off the roll.  That is the sort of thing I need to get right now, I am not going to be able to change it once I get this together.

9:55 — I love being able to find things!  I went to the photo albums and found a picture of Minerva set up in my garage in Davis.  I definately do not have all the parts.  Back to Melville I go.

How could I have thought I had everything without these?

11:10  Back from Melville with the missing pieces — they are huge, I can’t imagine how I did not notice they were not there.  But in my defense, they were stored in a totally different part of my parent’s basement.  (and it did not take me that long to go and come back, I did some other errends on the trip).

11:30 finished cleaning all the parts with wood oil.

12:10  two steps forward, one step back.  Looking at the photo I can see I put something on backwards.  But only one step ago, so not too hard to put right.

12:20 lunch break, and some ice for  back.

1:00 back to work, after reading weaving books with my lunch, and reminding myself about how things work.  It is starting to look like a loom.

1:55: Zack always said “if you can’t find a weaver look under the loom”  Too true.

2:24  It is done!  Well, except for the missing nut that I lost while undoing one last thing to get it right!  I will have to go to the hardware store and get a new one, since I simply can’t find it.  Grrrr.  But at least I have everything together, and the best part is that pushing treadle #1 actually raises headle #1, etc.  

Now to warping.  No, wait, now to pick up children and take them to swim club.

I have been thinking about education, online life, students and teachers, and ethics quite a bit reciently.  And I am probably going to go out on a bit of a limb here, and put forth a more radical version of what I think than maybe is true.  But I am reacting against what seems to me too much fear, too much separation between online life and real life, and the sense that if adults are too afraid or two overprotective of online stuff, then students will very rightly not feel that we get it, that we understand what is important, and what it all really means in their lives.

Before I set this out, I do want to start with some basic things.  I am not saying that students and teachers should not have privacy, or that students and teachers should not have separate lives, or that teachers do not need to be aware of issues of power in their interactions with students.  All of those things are important.  But they were important before the internet and they will continue to to be important regardless of what policies we do or don’t have about facebook, or email, or any electronic forum.

I feel that my online life is an extension of my life.  And it is not that different.  So the questions I want to ask about my interactions with students online are the SAME questions I want to ask about my interactions with students at Stanford Shopping Center, on University Ave, as members of the alumnae association, and in the larger community in which we all live.

So, if you don’t want me to be friends with students on facebook, what does that do to the fact I live in a neighborhood with two students living within blocks of me.   And I am friends with a parent who has a daughter in my class. Do I ignore that relationship?  Of course not.  I want to question my interactions with this student and this family to ask if I am being fair, if I am giving some advantage to the child because of the relationship.  Of course I don’t want to do that. But that does not mean I am not friends, or that I must cut off some part of my life.

So, what is my solution?  I am not sure, but for me the key is to be thoughtful about all relationships, and not assume that something electronic needs its own set of guidelines just because it is electronic.  I have an online presence.  That is a public version of me.  And I behave in that online space the same way I do in person. So if a student feels comfortable making me a “friend” in that space, I will accept that friendship.  Just like when I see a student on University Ave and she comes up to me to chat, recognizing that friendship, I am happy to see her, and I feel that I am doing a good job as a teacher and as a person, and that friendship is no different (or is it?) than one that a student initiates online.

It is something to keep thinking about.

My first try with the coolest presentation tool I have ever seen. I love Prezi, and I can tell the more I use it, the more I will be able to do with it.

http://prezi.com/109393/

As we have worked our way through the first two days of Summercore 2009, I have been thinking about change.  In some ways, like Steve B. says in Chapter 8, I thrive on change.  But my love of change (the Lexus) is tempered by my love of many older things (those olive trees are great), and my capacity to change myself, or the way I work, seems very different for different things.

I love watching my collegues find new things to bring change to their work, because although there are certainly frustrations with all new learning, there are so many wonderful “ah-ha” moments that make up for any frustrations.  I saw a lot of that this afternoon.

My questions for myself have to do with big changes versus small changes in our curriculum.  I think we are, as a school culture, excellent at small or even medium sized changes.  At the level of the individual course, we are all constantly redesigning, evaluating, fine-tuning, and improving what we do, how we teach, and what we teach.  We do it almost unconsciously, I think, and it keeps us interested all the time.

But when it comes to organizing the questions around big changes, or small things that seem big, I am not so sure we are as nimble or thoughtful as we might be.  I was thinking today about all the very practical technical knowledge we get in summercore, and where is it in the Castilleja curriculum that students are getting that stuff.  Without computer classes, they have to learn about file sizes, the rule of three for saving, and all sorts of basic good computing practices in their classes, but we don’t really have a system for making sure that happens.  Don’t get me wrong, I think many of our students  do know how to work very effectively with technology, and they do learn many excellent skills integrated into all kinds of classes, but do we know that they all know what they need?  I am afraid not.  How do we fix that?

Personally, I have been thinking about change.  What is it that made me finally make a change I have known for years was needed?  I lost weight, and have seriously been exercising, now with the goal of running the Nike Marathon in October.  That’s right, me, running a marathon.  Who would have thought?  There are powerful personal things that drive an individual to change.  What drives an institution to make change in thouhtful ways, rather than reactive ways?  What do we ask students to do to bring change in their lives? Do we try to teach them not just what to change but how to change?

Many more questions than answers tonight.

Last year in history 8, Margaret and I did an assignment for the students to articulate the views of the Patriots and the Loylists at specific points in the revolution using photos I took in Colonial Williamsburg and a fun comic making program called Comic Life.  But there were two problems.  Not everyone had Comic Life, so all work had to happen in class, and the resulting files were a bit difficult to deal with.  So I thought I would try out some of the free captioning services to see what the web 2.0 options are like for this assignment.

I was not too impressed with Bubblesnaps, because it produced a flash annimation, so I could not see how to integrate it easily into Moodle.  I might keep trying, but it also requires registration to save the images for more than 10 days, so that might also be a problem.

This is one I made in Bubblecaption.com.  It was easy to make, but the non-buble text options seem really limited (hard to put in titles, dates, etc. and make them look good).

Create your own caption

After reading about ways to link to video, I thought I would share one of the stranger movies from the Computer History Museum’s YouTube channel.  This film was made by IBM in 1965.  Things have changed.

What I love about the videos on the Computer History Museum YouTube channel is that they are a mix of primary sources, like this one, and great talks given at the museum by all kinds of people.  Of course I love just about every kind of history museum, but this one is clearly reaching out into the web 2.0 world with new types of exhibits and thinking about how people interact with museum artifacts.  I look forward to their big exhibit opening!

Well, I am not sure if I want to use this with my students, but it might work.

My loyalists and patriots poster is here: http://hpang.glogster.com/loyalistspatriots/

Back we go into a wonderful week of technology in the classroom.  But my preparation is starting with a little hardware learning.  I am using a netbook, an HP Mini to be specific.   So far I am really happy with it, although I am not so imporessed with the battery life.  I expected to need to make some typing adjustments, but so far that has not been an issue.

Everything I am struggling with, and it is all little stuff, is realated to things I love about a Mac that don’t seem to be there for Windows.  Although it is possible they are there, and I just don’t know all the tricks.  One of those is the two fingered scroll — how do I get this window to scroll without actually using the arrow on the scroll bar?  This is a big thing on a small screen.

I am also not that impressed with time to starting up from when I open the screen.  I guess I am spoiled by my mac that is essentially always on.

But as we think about computing solutions for students in the 2.0 classroom, I am compelled by the prices for these small computers and their weight (or lack thereof!).  And I think equality and ease of access may overwelm us soon, in a good way.  I think this one retails for about $400.  Not bad.